Spurned by Trump, Senate Democrats Take a Harder Line
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER JUNE 28, 2017
WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Trump won the White House, a cluster of Senate Democrats began the search for common cause with the unlikely new president, scouring the populist policy agenda that dominated his campaign.
For their part, Republicans believed that Mr. Trump’s win in nine states where Democratic senators are up for re-election next year would scare those lawmakers into acceptance of a Republican agenda, perhaps even voting to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
Neither has come to pass.
Rather than taking advantage of his honeymoon phase to pick an issue on which Democrats from conservative states might be amenable — fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, cutting taxes or stiffening immigration laws — Mr. Trump raced toward the most partisan corner of the room, pushing to repeal the health care law with no input from Democrats, in a manner that has proved deeply unpopular.
Democrats, watching Republicans careen around in search of a health care solution, honored the demand of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, that they stick together in their refusal to lift a finger to help until repeal was taken off the table.
And perhaps most important, Mr. Trump has rarely bothered to ask.
“I am a moderate from a state Trump won,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who is up for re-election next year in a state where Hillary Clinton received just 38 percent of the vote. “You’d think they would have called me sometime.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/us/politics/senate-democrats-sought-to-work-with-trump-then-he-began-governing.html